


Fissures

by May



Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 17:55:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamzee lifts up his hand and carefully flexes his fingers. His long, spidery digits curl towards him and then up, again. He’s not so much staring at the way that his fingers move, you know, but checking that he can still do it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fissures

Gamzee lifts up his hand and carefully flexes his fingers. His long, spidery digits curl towards him and then up, again. He’s not so much staring at the way that his fingers move, you know, but checking that he can still do it. Once, you were in the habit of checking the tiny veins on the backs of your knuckles where the skin is thinner – just to make sure, though they came up a dull pink-blue, anyway.

“Just seeing if I can all be moving my own motherfucking gristlehinges,” he mutters. For once, you’re not ahead of him. Your pan really is just sharp, bloody edges and nobody seemed to want to get in there – not a Serket, not an ugly puppet, not Gamzee’s silent creep of a dancestor. He flexes his arm up and down and, with his other hand, traces the line of his bone as it presses through the skin. “My shuffle corpse ain’t all what’s dancing of its own life without my blessing.”

Gamzee continues to poke at his own limbs and stretch them out and back again. He doesn’t expect a response from you. You’d never thought to even picture his gangly, growing frame being pulled around by somebody else. There’s a low, fundamental crack in your own pan about it.

Gamzee grabs at one of his horns and scratches around the base and it seems like it’s a regular habit that he’s picked up, anyway. You’re not sure, yet, how deep the hopbeast hole goes. Skaia might have imposed a system of karma, but that broke alongside determinism and so did you all, even the dead.

“It’s like I’m all to be looking at the front of my pan, again,” the tone of his voice still rises and falls, though less dramatically than you’re used to. Some part of you thinks he’s got no right to be anything but an extreme. He continues to push at his own scalp and there’s a kind of sickly awkwardness about seeing a troll your age doing that. Gamzee had a growth spurt around seven sweeps or maybe closer to seven and a half sweeps but it’s hard to be sure about that after he disappeared and you started thinking in human time. “No other motherfuckers in there.”

“Yeah.” You’re not pale right now. The feeling is something rancid. Gamzee wraps the long fingers of one hand around a horn and tugs, his thumbnail skirting along small fissures. Trolls with bigger horns often have those, especially if they spent a wigglerhood falling off things. He closes his eyes and tugs enough that you know that it pulls at his scalp.

It was a mess even before every single thing more dangerous than Gamzee made itself known (including _her_ ). You didn’t have time to pick apart that warm, confusing mass of guilt before it all got broken open completely and everything turned itself inside out and Terezi disappeared to fight another battle that was in no way yours.

Gamzee frowns and you notice the new minutia of his face. His teeth fit, now, unlike when he was six and they took over. It’s harder to see a shadow or a monster if you can split him into detail. He huddles in on himself and circles one wrist with the fingers of the other hand. You watch those fingers twitch, half-idly. It was a mess, a thorough mess and, in the end, you couldn’t determine the points where things switched, again.

“It’s not for any kind of motherfucker.” You do give him a vague nod, but you could still probably really be anyone. He takes a breath like he’s sobbing, even though he isn’t, and his nails score across the skin of his arms. Purple draws up a little where he scratches. He looks down at his new, shallow wounds, startled, and pushes at them a little, smearing the blood. “But I used to all think that maybe this was all being to be someone else’s. Not to even be motherfucking questioned.”

You move towards him, and not because the sight of him like that curdles into the serendipitous somewhere in your bloodpusher (and it really doesn’t, you don’t think). There’s just no point in waiting to find out exactly what he was responsible for, and, when you get down to it, you’re not all that enthusiastic about anyone’s damnation, not even his.


End file.
